On Wednesday, 20th October, Alperton Community School welcomed back a very distinguished former pupil, Dr Chet Trivedy, who attended Alperton back in the 1980s.
Chet has had the most incredible and colourful career journey. He has spent the majority of his life in medicine and is currently a senior consultant in Emergency Medicine at the Brighton and Sussex University and a senior lecturer at The Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). He is also the founder of the Tulsi foundation as well as a medical advisor for the Wildlife Conservation Trust and the doctor for the England Cricket team.
On his arrival at our Ealing Road school he was met by two Year 9 students, Russell and Safaa, along with Mr Rayleigh who gave him a full tour of our new building. The students asked him many questions about his current roles, his background and his upbringing. They learned that he had initially wanted to be a zookeeper but chose to become a doctor after discussing it with his parents. After completing his GCSEs and A levels, he trained as a dentist and then later decided to move into cancer research and so qualified as a doctor.
More recently, Chet was inspired to write a children’s book called ‘Tulsi the Tiger’ in which the story centers around the fact that each animal has a different illness which helps to teach children about the power of medicine.
During lunch, Chet asked Russell and Safaa about their career aspirations and what they enjoyed about Alperton Community School. Chet then had some photos taken with a professional photographer in front of the school and then walked across our Stanley Avenue building. Ilayda and Nikhil-Nayankumar gave him a tour of the upper site school. Chet was very familiar with this establishment even though it had been over 30 years since he had studied there.
Chet then gave an impromptu career talk to a number of Sixth formers who were interested in pursuing medicine as a potential career. As well as being a very genuine and generous person, he was also a motivational speaker and told many anecdotes including the fact that he was kidnapped by baboons at the tender age of 8 weeks and at 4 years of age he ran away from his family home to look for Cheetahs. He also explained his many successes and failures and gave the students some very sage advice that ‘failure is your friend’ and that you should ‘make your dreams follow you’.
After speaking with Mr McKenna about how the school and the area had changed during the past 30 years, Chet and Mr Rayleigh returned to the lower school where he was formally presented with a thank you card, an artwork produced by one of our students, chocolates and a Poem Anthology book written by Alperton students and staff.
It was an amazing day and one which the students who met Chet will never forget. He was a true example of what students can achieve after they have studied at ACS and it was incredible to spend time with someone who is so kind and considerate, full of surprises, a great communicator, passionate, knowledgeable, caring and is still so fond of his old school and the community.
